Brian Larkin

Social Text, Fall 2008

Abstract

A presumption guiding this analysis is that religious movements are constituted through communicative acts—practices of mediation whereby adherents bind themselves to one another and to a higher power. Religious movements are brought together—realized as movements—through the circulation of discursive forms that address religious subjects, calling them into being, uniting them in common actions of reading, listening, seeing. In the contemporary world, electronic media are central to this process. They are dominant technologies (though by no means the only ones) whereby this circulation takes place and the forms of political and religious identities are forged. How then do we understand the nature of mediation and circulation in forming religious movements? And what does this tell us about the nature of the category of religion itself?

View the paper here: Ahmed Deedat and the Form of Islamic Evangelism